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New submitter mcmadman writes "In a bizarre turn of events, the legal affairs committee of the European Parliament, voted to weaken a reform of the copyright monopoly for allowing re-publication and access to orphan works. What is surprising is that the voter turnout happened to be 113%. That there were three votes too many, and that these three votes determined the outcome, was pointed out to the committee. Unfortunately, when this was done, along with formally requesting a re-vote, the re-vote was denied."

This is standard practice in the EU. When Ireland held a referendum and rejected the Lisbon Treaty, the EU technocrats didn't like the results so they just held ANOTHER referendum six months later.

Er, no. They did what any sensible person would do when their proposal was rejected: listen to the objections and fix it. They changed the stuff the Irish didn't like and then the Irish approved the changes. What's wrong with that? You expect them to give up totally at the first rejection over any aspect what-so-ever?

Radical is such a strong word. And if elected he'll be completely at the mercy of the GOP establishment, especially if they win the Senate. Weakest of the 3 contenders by quite a margin. His electability seems to be based on not taking stands on any policy issue and plugging Christian Right values as often as possible.

How long do think it would be, before everyone and their third cousin lynched Rick, if he got his way and nobody (including married folk) should or could have sex except for procreation. The guy is in that rarefied region of the WackoSphere where even the deranged fear to go.

Being Catholic myself, I had to look into this. According to Wikipedia (lol) he is Catholic, and does have some pretty wacked out views on morality. A small number of them even agree with Catholic doctrine. Yeah, this guy is a nutcase,

Apparently it can be seen on the video recording of the meeting (can't watch since I am at work now), but the story is grossly exaggerated. The vote in question was not about the proposal itself, but some obscure amendment where one party still wanted some more discussions on the exact wording. If you see how these comittees usually go through votes on amendments at machine gun speed where every member just looks at his party-approved voting sheet, it's easy to understand that these things happen from time to time. And since the vote was for an obscure amendment to a non-binding recommendation to let someone negotiate on the topic with the commission, then I completely understand that it was just brushed over (even though it shouldn't happen)

Thank you for this. No, Andrew was not aware of this matter; but we have since looked into it and indeed discovered that although a great deal of confusion reigned over the vote in question the extra voters appear not to have affected the material outcome. At any rate, as you know, the final legislative votes will take place in plenary and not in committee, and my Liberal colleagues will ensure that we will table appropriate amendments.

You may be interested, therefore, in my recent proposal to change the rules of procedure of the House to insist on roll call votes at every legislative vote at committee stage (see website).

Thank you again for writing.

Yours sincerely,

Kilian Bourke
Caseworker to
Andrew Duff
Liberal Democrat MEP for the East of England

I took part in the vote as a Member of the JURI Committee in the European Parliament, and I can correct you on a few points.
The amendments to a report can change its meaning completely, and the amendment that we lost was a rather important one. Therefore it is wrong to say that it was and "obscure" amendment, and imply that it was not important.
The report is a legislative report that will turn into a binding directive and then national law once it is adopted, so it is not the question of a non-binding (or "own initiative") report this time.

As for TFA whether this is true or not frankly doesn't matter, what DOES matter is until the people actually get a voice and a say at the negotiating table then ALL copyrights and patterns should be ignored as the unjust laws that they are. When laws are created by bribery and backroom dealing that goes completely against the will of the people call it what it is, tyranny. Its the locking up of our entire culture behind paywalls for decades af

Hold on fellas, you've got it all wrong. Math is different in Europe (they've got their commas and periods all backward in many places), especially when it's attorneys doing the counting. Folks just have to understand this, and fortunately there's a great instructional video [youtube.com] available for those in need of further tutelage.

Hold on fellas, you've got it all wrong. Math is different in Europe (they've got their commas and periods all backward in many places), especially when it's attorneys doing the counting. Folks just have to understand this, and fortunately there's a great instructional video [youtube.com] available for those in need of further tutelage.

Hold on fellas, you've got it all wrong. Math is different in Europe (they've got their commas and periods all backward in many places), especially when it's attorneys doing the counting. Folks just have to understand this, and fortunately there's a great instructional video [youtube.com] available for those in need of further tutelage.

Very true. For a start - we call it Maths

So that's where the vote count went wrong! They were counting plurals where there should be singulars!

Hold on fellas, you've got it all wrong. Math is different in Europe (they've got their commas and periods all backward in many places), especially when it's attorneys doing the counting. Folks just have to understand this, and fortunately there's a great instructional video [youtube.com] available for those in need of further tutelage.

Very true. For a start - we call it Maths

So that's where the vote count went wrong! They were counting plurals where there should be singulars!

No, that's the 'S' bend. They're going to need a plumber because someone has clogged it up with due process, and people are starting to notice the stench.

That's important regarding accumulation, but as a previous resident of the American Upper Midwest, I can assure you that driving in sleet is a bitch regardless of the road temperature. If the road is cold, you drive on ice. If the road is warm, you drive on partially melted, wet ice. Knowing whether a given storm system is going to drop rain or sleep can be a life-or-death bit of information.

Celsius is directly related to Kelvin, just offset so that 0C is the freezing point of water instead of Absolute zero. It's easy to convert between the two, just +/- 273.15 depending on where you're going. 0C - 273.15 is 0K.

I don't think either counts as "Metric" though since there aren't any milikelvins or anything like that, but you can still have a fraction of either if you want more granularity than a single degree.

I believe Fahrenheit has an equivalent called Rankine, whereby 0Ra is absolute zero and t

Celsius is directly related to Kelvin, just offset so that 0C is the freezing point of water instead of Absolute zero. It's easy to convert between the two, just +/- 273.15 depending on where you're going. 0C - 273.15 is 0K.

It's the other way around, but yes. Celsius was calibrated to the freezing and boiling points of distilled water, and for Kelvins, they said "hey, that's an easy to calibrate scale, but let's set 0 at absolute zero".

I believe Fahrenheit has an equivalent called Rankine, whereby 0Ra is absolute zero and the difference between the two is a fixed value, however that does bring the question - what's the point of 0F? What does it represent? Aside from the benefit of having "more" values between boiling and freezing water, is there a benefit to Fahrenheit that Celsius doesn't have?

0'F is the freezing point of salt water. Which salt water... unknown. It has different freezing points for different salt densities... I think it was supposed to be sea water, but again, sea water has different saline densities depending on where in the world you're taking it from, and also how deep you're taking it from.

100'F was supposed to be the human body temperature, but it was calibrated against somebody who was running a fever that day. Normal human body temperature is supposedly 98.6'F, but it does actually vary from person to person, depending on their health and metabolism at the time.

Ultimately, Fahrenheit is a completely arbitrary scale, calibrated to completely unrelated points in nature, some of which aren't reproducible outside of the human species. The reason it still exists is because it was proposed earlier than the Celcius scale, and it caught ground. Also because the only country that still uses it absolutely refuses to consider anything metric, because the French are using it, and that would be wrong.

Right, I'm sure it has nothing to do with what an enormous pain in the ass it is to convert the entirety of the United States to a different system of measurement. It's not like this is a big place or anything, we could do it in a weekend. No, it must be because we hate the French.

I mean come on, that's stupid. No one likes the French...it isn't just us. Give us a little credit here.

Right, I'm sure it has nothing to do with what an enormous pain in the ass it is to convert the entirety of the United States to a different system of measurement. It's not like this is a big place or anything, we could do it in a weekend. No, it must be because we hate the French.

And yet Canada, Russia, China, and several other countries that are bigger, both geographically and by population, had no trouble switching to the metric system. You do realize that Brunei is the only country in the world other than the US that still uses the Imperial system at an official level?

There's a lot of resistance to change in the US, but no more than exists elsewhere in the world. Besides which, do you have any idea how much it's costing industry to have to switch between measurement systems when you move between countries? Several large businesses and industries have already switched themselves over to Metric, because it just makes it easier to work with the rest of the world. It's a question of political will, but it really is about time the US joined the rest of the world in a common measurement system.

The comment about the French was facetious... I'm glad to see it was appreciated.... It was either that, or a joke about Americans being confused by all the multiples of ten.

I think it is partly that it is a pain in the ass to switch and partly that we don't really have to. People cater to us and our stupid measurements and we aren't forced to adapt. When we do finally switch (because it does just need to happen) it will really suck. I recognize that the metric system is superior mathematically, but I cannot think in metric having grown up with the English system. I have no idea how many meters tall I am or how much I weight or any of that. It seems like one of those thing

The freezing point is that of Brine (IIRC) at saturation. Since small impurities in *pure* water make a huge difference in the freezing point, but bugger all difference in brine, brine water is a lot easier to see freezing reliably to calibrate your lowest temperature. And a saturated brine solution is easy: keep adding salt until it starts precipitating out, then decant off the top.

All metrology is done to astonishingly high precision and does need pristine laboratories whatever the scale. What made sense in the mid 1700's probabl yisn't so much of a concern now.

And as for "boiling point of water", well, what pressure?

Mean atmospheric pressure at sea level, which Celsius calibrated for at about the same time that Fahrenheit decided to use mammalian body temperature, which is also not well controlled.

Both systems are quite arbitrary, but when it comes to relation to physical situations, I would guess that more people have experience with freezing water than saturated water-salt-ammonia mixtures.

But the best reason for Celsius is that it is part of the metric system which is frankly superior to the imperial one in pretty much evey way, even if there's not a hugh different in the temperature part of the system.

"Since small impurities in *pure* water make a huge difference in the freezing point, but bugger all difference in brine,"

The freezing point depression of water is 3.7 K for every mol/l of dissolved salt (assuming two mol ions per mol salt). Adding the same impurity to the saturated brine will lower the freezing point by the same amount as for pure water. Moreover, medium hard water is about 1 mmol/l, so it's just a few mK error anyway.

Not only the the point made by my sibling poster (who should be modded up btw), but at least some imperical units were designed for easy divisibility.

12 inches in a foot, for instance. 12 is easily divided by 2, 3, 4, and 6. 10 is only divisible by 1, 2, and 5.

also, volumes are mostly powers of two.4 tablespoons in a gill, 4 gills in a pint, 2 cups in a pint, 2 pints in a quart, 4 quarts in a gallon, 2 gallons in a peck, 4 pecks in a bushel. We seem to be missing half-bushel, half-gallon, half-pint, and hal

A penny had a 1/4th unit called a farthing, too. And check out the origins of 'Pieces of Eight', from spanish gold coins (which were often cut into halves, fourths and eighths).

Have never looked it up, but I suspect these were commonplace because even unschooled math-illiterate people could become competent enough to trust physical/visual math by splitting or combining groups. And that simplicity is essential for easy commerce and employment

2. imperical: originating in or based on observation or experience . Your spell checker doesn't flag it if you're using the wrong word. Substitute "yore" or "your" for "you're" in the previous sentence and it is incorrect but unflagged.

It's a case of who watches the watchers. When you corrupt an organization it is best done in-depth and it is most successfully done from the top.

We "Americans" (e.g. the United States of part, but we are working diligently on spreading our scheme to the rest of America) have a system of Checks and Balances. That is it doesn't have to Balance if you can make sure nobody Checks. We use this system for nearly every purpose. It's nice to see Europe following our lead. Or perhaps they deeded it to us as some point, which doesn't matter, we will take the credit.

As to this being the end of democracy, well you are using the wrong definition: Democracy is the means by which we ensure we are governed -no- -better- that we deserve.

Since its foundation? Do you even know what the EU is? Socialist is pretty much the least applicable term. It is, first and foremost, a trade market. Everything else it does is "collateral damage", aimed at stabilising said market.

It's worth pointing out that it's only a preliminary committee. It being voted down in this committee won't necessarily prevent it from seeing the floor the full parliament, but it won't come along with the backing of the special committee.

There was a member of the Swedish Pirate Party in the committee and he's been the one agitating for a re-vote. The frightening thing about this is that there are only 24 members on this committee and one was absent, so with 23 possible votes, the final vote was 12-14.

BUT, if 12 people actually voted in favour of the bill, that would leave only 11 against.

Keep in mind, this isn't highly corrosive stuff.

The bill is talking about "orphaned works" which are those works that will never again see the light of day because no owner claims them. It is likely that when the copyright expires in 70 years, with nobody to preserve them, or assign their rights to a publisher who can, these works will be completely lost to humanity. This legislation would seek to prevent this and increase the overall value to humanity with NO money lost by putting them in public domain.

Nobody is arguing that this is a bad idea, but the recording industry lobbies see it as the "sharp end of the sword" when it comes to copyright reform, so they will fight against it vehemently.

This legislation would seek to prevent this and increase the overall value to humanity with NO money lost by putting them in public domain.

As there is a vast overproduction of entertainment today the competition is for the consumers time. Thus, any material that is presented for free cuts into the revenue stream of the for-profit production companies, and even worse, entrenches the idea that entertainment might come for free.

Remember, these companies consider basically any time spent not giving them money stealing.

The bill is talking about "orphaned works" which are those works that will never again see the light of day because no owner claims them. It is likely that when the copyright expires in 70 years, with nobody to preserve them, or assign their rights to a publisher who can, these works will be completely lost to humanity.

Wait. Don't most of our historical documents and records meet this description? Yow!

Nobody is arguing that this is a bad idea, but the recording industry lobbies see it as the "sharp end of the sword" when it comes to copyright reform, so they will fight against it vehemently.

How do you determine what is an orphan work? (and who gets to make that determination?)I bet Warner or Fox or MGM or Sony or EMI or Universal or Electronic Arts or Disney or any other major entity with a large body of work will have all kinds of things they own the copyright to but dont even know they own. (including all the stuff they may have picked up through acquisitions and mergers)

I'm guessing a lot of those works could be identified by someone skilled in searching historical records (And I mean pre-internet here, going through old microfilms) and paid to put in enough hours. So it's only if they become popular again that there will be any reason even for potential copyright holders to invest the time in figuring out if they own it.

The sad thing is, hundreds and perhaps thousands of films and sound recordings created before the mid 1960's are deteriorating at such a rapid rate that by the time any of this copyright mess ever gets sorted, they'll be gone forever.

Huge numbers of them are rotting away in vaults, with even well-known films such as Gone With The Wind apparently having to be made from later copies now because the original film masters are basically rotted to nothing.

Some Hollywood studios have however, invested the proper resources into caring for these historical cultural artifacts. Disney for one, keeps their film stock in better climate-controlled condition than the US Government keeps the Constitution.

There's a reason movies like Peter Pan and Lady and the Tramp are in the vault for the next 50 years. It was determined that they would create new digital masters of the films and keep the originals stored safely while we wait for better and more permanent storage options to be invented for film transfer - in which case they will make new masters on that storage medium with the current digital masters used to work as a clean copy in case of further film deterioration of the original stock. Then the originals will more than likely finally be destroyed just due to rot and the process of transfer.

One way to do it would be to pay a tax for everything that you want to keep under copyright. This could be a token tax even as low as â1 per work per year, but not paying the tax would place the work in the public domain. These folks are so keen to sue whenever they see someone violating their copyrights they ought to know what copyrights they own. This way the government has a tax record that can tell everyone who owns what.

A tax or any other kind of payment would be complicated to administer. It'd require clever handling of works that are published and developed over time - such as a Wikipedia page or OpenSSH.

With any copyright discussion, the elephant in the room has to be the length of copyright terms. Drop the terms down to far more reasonably limits and we see many such problems go away. Publishers can continue to benefit from older works, so long as they can find ways to enhance them, thus creating a derivative work that is subject to a fresh copyright term. They already do this for movies, either through adding fresh content or by remastering.

Why we allow copyright beyond 15 years for anything at all is to me a travesty. A publisher that cannot make a reasonable return within 15 years really should think long and hard about their business model and the quality of their work.

The bill is talking about "orphaned works" which are those works that will never again see the light of day because no owner claims
them. It is likely that when the copyright expires in 70 years, with nobody to preserve them, or assign their rights to a publisher
who can, these works will be completely lost to humanity.

If you live in Europe, write to your MEP. Vote fraud is no joke.

Who cares? If you live in Europe, or anywhere else for that matter, start scanning those books and put them up on the web.
There are places like formerly library.nu [wikipedia.org] (now defunct) which will accept the scans, and replicate them. Fuck the publishers, and fuck the politicians. They can't be trusted with our human heritage.

This isn't some big election with millions of votes getting counted. This is 23 people in a room, 12 on one side, 11 on the other, and the eleven declaring themselves the victors while the twelve just shrug and accept it. Do the people on this committee care so little for democracy that they just blithely accept it when their opponents' imaginary friends cast ballots?

Better question: Why isn't a re-vote automatic in this kind of circumstance? Or, why is it even possible to deny a re-vote after such an obvious error? This is why politicians fail us...anyone with half a brain would implement more sensible procedures.

I was about to make a smug comment about how those zany citizens in Europe need to demand better accountability from their political representatives.

Then I remember that I live in this U.S.. Where the politicians have purported to make this law, despite the Constitution rendering it void the moment it was penned. And then people salute it regardless, because it was signed and must therefore be official.

I've the feeling that US politicians have less accountability than European politicians. Well save the ones on EU parliament maybe...

And in this committee case, I would expect the votes are not anonymous. So it should be known who voted how. That's at least the normal situation when votes are done - and how voters can know how certain politicians think. I hope the case will roll on a bit, not as much because it's about copyright but for the apparent vote discrepancy. I'd really like to know how that came to

I don't know about you guys. But I'm writing a complaint and asking for an investigation into this later today. These sort of things are simply unacceptable and should be stopped, no matter what the subject of the vote is.

When was the last time THE PEOPLE had a REAL VOTE on how their country worked?

What we have is an obscene extension of the patent system extended into a politically domineering overlord system. We vote for a bunch of self interested morons to make stupendously bad decisions, rewarded richly for doing nothing or worse, followed by being given the chance to revote on our next oppressors when the previous ones fail (but only when they let us).

This isn't democracy. As article shows, it is corrupt.

This one billion line program has been hacked together for too many years. Too many exceptions. Time for a rewrite.

"The Committee adopted the amended Commission proposal and the draft legislative resolution by 22 votes in favour and 1 abstention"

This is apparently about a vote on one of the amendments to the proposal. The minutes linked in the parent list accepted amendments, but don't give votes on the individual amendments. Similarly, the committee voting records ( see here [europa.eu]) don't seem to include the outcomes. It should be possible to check however, as the meetings are recorded:The vote occurred during this session [europa.eu] Unfortunately, the wmv sound doesn't seem to work with flip4mac and I get all interpretations at the same time, so I can't check it n

Interesting stuff, hopefully it'll eventually pass. In short, if you do a "diligent search" and are unable to locate a rightsholder, the work will be considered orphan. This is basically an area "between" copyright and public domain; you're allowed to reproduce the work "for the purposes of digitization, making available, indexing, cataloguing, preservation or restoration."

But how much is dilligent? Somehow I doubt a fre google queries will count. Large companies may be able to hire a historian to go and trawl through old newspapers of the period looking for advertisments or reading actor biographies in hope of finding a passing reference, but that effectively excludes amateurs who don't have the time or money for that level of checking.

But how much is dilligent? Somehow I doubt a fre google queries will count. Large companies may be able to hire a historian to go and trawl through old newspapers of the period looking for advertisments or reading actor biographies in hope of finding a passing reference, but that effectively excludes amateurs who don't have the time or money for that level of checking.

It's actually defined int he text too.

#Article 3 Diligent search31. For the purposes of establishing whether a work is an orphan work, the organisations referred to in Article 1(1) shall ensure that a diligent search is carried out for each work, by consulting the appropriate sources for the category of works in question.

32. The sources that are appropriate for each category of works shall be determined by each Member State, in consultation with rightholders and users, and include, the sources listed in the

It would be funny if the story was actually true. However, the official press release of the EU parliament states:

"MEPs (Members of the european parliament) unanimously approved a mandate for Lidia Geringer de Oedenberg (S&D, PL), to start talks with the Council to agree reach an agreement on the legislation.

Ms Geringer de Oedenberg said "This regulation would finally make it possible to get some hidden treasures out of the closet and make them available to the general public. Now it is time to start negotiating with national governments and stand up for our points"."

So to sum it up, one wannabe journalist/blogger picks up something from an unreliable source, quotes an MEP who didn't even post anything about this "scandal" on his own blog, and suddenly this is big news?

Video of the voting [europa.eu] is available on the EP website.
The agenda item starts at 10:27, and the voting runs from 10:31 to 10:51.
The amendment in question appears to be "Compromise 20", voted on at 10:39, which is indeed rejected by 12 votes to 14.
This was an all-party amendment that the centre-right EPP party then withdrew support from, because they were not entirely happy with the wording, according to one of their MEPs at the start of the meeting. (10:29).
As the video shows, the EP tends to machine-gun through amendment votes, which are held in one swoop after months of discussion.
You really need the papers for the meeting and your preferred faction's voting guide to turn them into an acceptable spectator sport.
One of the extra votes could perhaps have been the chairman's casting vote; but it's not clear how there could have been two.

Unfortunately there does not appear to be a copy of the "Compromise Amendments", including the disputed amendment in question, "Compromise 20". One of the MEPs complains in the video at the end of the agenda item (10:51) that the text of these were only circulated on the night before the meeting.

It's not unusual for new texts to appear as heads get bashed together in the days immediately before the actual voting (in fact, it is an essential part of the system); but in this case they don't appear to have been placed on the website, or at any rate I didn't know where to find them.

The amended report from JURI, consolidating the results of these votes, appears now to have been formally prepared with the document reference A7-0055/2012, though I couldn't find the text of it yet on the Parliament website. This will now go forward for a short debate before the whole parliament, before voting on the amendments proposed by JURI, the amendments proposed by the other two committees, and any other amendments to the Commission text proposed by a sufficient number of MEPs.

While actually everone jumps on the train and covers this story it still seems to be almost completely unverified. The linked article links to a single blog post that does not contain a single link to anything. No protocol. Not even any source that would mention that said vote has happened at all.

This just seem to be a bunch of blogs linked to each other. Where can we verify that 113% percent voted? I have no idea what that means.

The automatic assumption is that there was voter fraud but it's possible there is some procedural thing going on here. I have no way to verify anything because these links always use themselves or a sister site for authentication. That doesn't work.

The main reasons for the negativity directed against the EU in the UK are:

Rupert Murdoch wanted the UK to be a low-cost production area for his newspapers with poor worker protection - the EU prevents that

If the EU survives its early problems - so far no Civil War like the one the USA had on its way to union - it will eventually have more power than the US, and the US doesn't like that

Most European countries have standards of journalism which embarrass the likes of the Sun and the Mail - even Bild is moving up market slowly - and UK media owners are afraid of EU regulation

Small Conservative businesses who don't see why they shouldn't exploit their workforces

People who still think there is a British Empire.

Personally, I feel that the European parliament is far more likely to do the right thing than the British one, simply because (a) it is far more diverse and (b) it has members from countries who know that war is a really bad thing.